Barbier, Marie-Anne

Barbier, Marie-Anne (1670, Orléans; 1745, Paris), librettist, has left no record of the exact dates of her birth, her arrival in Paris, or her death. She seems to have come to the capital after 1700, however, and her earliest literary acquaintances appear to have been Boursault, the abbé Bignon, and the abbé Pellegrin (see seventeenth-century volume for Pellegrin). She was never very prominent in the society of her time, and Voltaire confused her with Mlle Bernard, the niece of Fontenelle…